A seamless migration equals £60,000 savings

Quarter Media counts on the ability to run ads in the most intelligent way for its customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So, a seamless integration helps - that means no disruption to the network and no requirement for publishers to recode their ad tags.

In the words of its CEO Tibor Gaddum, "If we are not serving ads continuously in the most efficient way, we are leaking revenue. Any disruption to our operations means our publishers also lose revenue and our advertising customers don't see results for their campaigns – it's simply not an option."

Quarter Media wanted to move to a new ad serving platform, but needed to be sure that the migration would be risk-free and would not affect its customers: all of the network's publisher customers had installed unique 'ad tags' of code that enabled Quarter Media to serve ads to fill their inventory. Quarter Media was concerned that, if it had to change the coding of these ad tags, it would have to ask each publisher in turn to do this: a time-consuming process that would cause customer dissatisfaction.

SAS did a tremendous job: I have never received such a professional and efficient service from a supplier. The team at SAS was always available to help and to allay our concerns.

Tibor Gaddum
CEO, Quarter Media

"It quickly became clear that working with SAS and adopting its Intelligent Advertising Platform would ensure a successful migration with minimal impact on our customers," explains Tibor Gaddum, CEO of Quarter Media. "SAS' offer was unique: the team built a bespoke translator tool to ensure that publishers would not need to change the coding of their ad tags, and took the burden of process away from us, whilst providing us with enhanced functionality and productivity via the new platform."

"Without this offer, we would have needed to run a translation tool ourselves, at a significant financial and time cost," adds Gaddum. "No other provider was able to offer this service. If we had translated the ad tags ourselves, we would have had to continue to run our previous platform alongside SAS® Intelligent Advertising during the two or three month translation period to ensure that all publishers were delivered ads, whether their ad tags had been recoded yet or not. This would have shouldered us with an additional £60,000 in costs and a very complex task that would impact our operational performance."

A seamless migration

Minimising the possible impact of a migration on customers was a priority for Quarter Media. To ensure that the migration would be as risk free as possible, the SAS team trialled the entire process, allowing Quarter Media to try the new platform out. SAS built a translation tool and converted the rich media code for ad tags. This trial process empowered SAS to react to Quarter Media's evolving needs, and to mitigate potential risks as far as possible ahead of migration.

The migration itself involved two steps: firstly, the recoding of the Quarter Media site and associated translation processes; and secondly, transferring all the campaigns from the old system to the new.

"The migration was very smooth, and the SAS team was in the office with us as we made the switch to the new system," remarked Gaddum. "SAS did a tremendous job: I have never received such a professional and efficient service from a supplier. The team at SAS was always available to help and to allay our concerns."

Plugging revenue leakage with powerful insight

The SAS® Intelligent Advertising platform is used by Quarter Media's ad operations team to monitor ad campaigns currently running and to set up new campaigns. Gaddum said of efficiency improvements, "We are now able to offer our advertising clients direct access into the SAS platform to book new campaigns, which negates the need for us to receive booking calls and improves efficiency; previously this would have been impossible."

Since moving to SAS Intelligent Advertising, Quarter Media has unlocked a series of new functionalities and improvements; not least, improved reporting means Quarter Media can spot underperforming campaigns rapidly and make corrections. As impressions generated directly translate into revenue for the business, identifying and addressing underperformance improves the bottom line.

As Gaddum describes through an example, "For a campaign with a £50 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and a target of 1 million impressions which we under-delivered by 10%, or 100,000 impressions, we could expect to leak approximately £5000 in revenue."

For Quarter Media, avoiding revenue leakage is all about a powerful solution that can report on and present data in a clearly understood way; according to Gaddum, "Reporting is more automated than was previously the case, allowing for a faster and more comprehensive overview of how campaigns are performing. We can ensure that campaigns are consistently delivering the full number of impressions during the time allocated; and, if they are underperforming we can adjust the campaign in a single screen. This is much faster to do in the new system, increasing productivity and preventing revenue leakage."

He added, "We haven't yet quantified the complete financial impact of reduced leakage but we expect it to be very significant."

Challenge

Migrate to a new ad delivery platform with minimum impact on customers and no requirement to recode publisher ad tags. Improve productivity, and make it simpler to identify and alter underperforming ad campaigns to prevent potential revenue leakage.

Solution

SAS® Intelligent Advertising Platform is used to manage and deliver ad campaigns, and to report on performance of campaigns and inventory.

Benefits

Seamless migration to new platform saving £60,000 in labour and technology costs. Enhanced reporting functionality and ability to obtain a comprehensive view of campaign performance. Improved functionality simplifies the process of making changes to campaigns, improving productivity and optimising performance.